With standard PC hardware, that would work. Some things like firmware or drivers can be auto-detected and installed on demand. Symptom would be that e.g. your WiFi or video card does not work. The safe way is to back up user data (including config) and install newly. This will work almost always as the kernel provides hardware abstraction - that is its main purpose. Installers like Debian are also quite quick… quicker than restoring a backup.